Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

Would you recommend the Nook HD JL?

Are Kindles 32-bit? There's a speed trick if you have a 4 GB cap on a 32-bit system.

you'd think even 2GB would last a while but I have a number of eBooks that are inexplicably 20-30MB in size... they don't even have a lot of illustrations of anything.

The Nook HD screen is really beautiful, things like the New Yorker or old comic books look absolutely gorgeous on it. I got the Glow because I just don't feel natural reading b&w text on that kind of screen, though.

I feel like BN will discontinue/stop supporting it soon, but you can hack it into a regular Android tablet (I mean it is an Android tablet but you can do some trickery to strip out the Nook aspects of it-- this is what I'll do if BN abandons it).

I've happily played stuff like color graphical flavors of nethack on it too. Etc etc.

you'd think even 2GB would last a while but I have a number of eBooks that are inexplicably 20-30MB in size... they don't even have a lot of illustrations of anything.

> I have a number of eBooks that are inexplicably 20-30MB in size...

sounds like they are actual scans of books rather than ocr'd copies. some of the free google books do this.

that said, i downloaded a scan of a 300 page book the other day and it was only 3MB!

the file i have of the brian eno biography is like 60 MB

Filled up my 2G pretty quickly. Like to have stuff on there so I can search it. If the Amazon Overlords allowed us to search the content we owned online I guess I could live with it. Such a thing does not exist now, does it?

nah, they're not page scans, they're just (I assume) really badly created (or converted) .epub or .mobi files!

You can unzip epub files - they are just zipped HTML. Would be interesting to find out what exactly is wrong with them. (DRM will stop you reading the individual files but you'll be able to see the components and their sizes)

wouldn't be surprised to see a 25MB image file for the book cover, to be honest.

so frustrating how i can't tinker with these new az3 kindle files or even view on my computer without d/ling the bloated kindle app. has anyone found a way round the drm yet?

After a few tweaks Calibre is your drm breaking friend.

i was surprised at how well calibre + a plugin converted some amazon purchases to epubs for my kobo. i hadn't even realised it had worked but there they were all converted and looking pristine.

(couldn't do it under linux though, had to install it on windows partition. using wine is possible but you have to be careful with software versions and i didn't have wine installed and don't have the bandwidth to download it)

ah great, what plugin?

i did have a hunt for all this stuff a few months back and found it impossible, hopefully this is a recent update/release

My nook didn't survive a drop so I recently got a kobo glo which I am going through a love phase with. It has a squarer more bookish feel than a nook, the magnetic open/close sleep mode is nice and it has a button for glow mode which has a much more diffuse and warmer/brighter light quality and it doesn't lose your bookmarks. Not sure if I should have gone for a paperwhite instead at a similar price but am more than happy with what I have and fuck amazon/converting all my ebooks/PDFs into mobis. I have changed my mind about the page buttons, after using this for a couple of weeks now I am quite happy to live without them. The only criticisms I can think of is that a hundred quid is a bit pricey and it was slow as fuck to get started, it seemed to be updating forever but pretty sweet reader after that.

That's good to know in the event nook goes under. Does it take micro sd?

Yeah there is a micro sd slot on the left side which doesn't have the same little plug as the nook, but I presume that won't be a problem with a protective case covering it.

And what's its onboard storage?

1.32 GB

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B0GhZiKCIAABnIh.jpg

the best part of this is that it was an online poll. no one was accosted on the street. the 2% IDKs volunteered that information.

maybe they weren't sure if they should count the Kindle app on their iphones

Plenty of less technically adept people who own a reader but don't know what it's called, probably, or saw the question and didn't know what it was.

anyone else had this problem? seen a book i'd like, cries in the desert by john gatt, as recommended over on s&d: True Crime! books but it isn't available as an ebook in the uk. i've seen it on amazon.com as an ebook but can't purchase it as i'm uk based. is there anything i can do? could i get an american to set up an account and have it mailed to my kindle email even though it's registered in the uk? or would i need to get someone to buy it and crack the drm so i can use it?

That's a common problem in Australia, too. I used to be able to get stuff from other e-bookshops, since if they took Paypal they didn't check your country of origin, but now they've gone out of business. It's possible Google Play might have it for the UK.

You will be able to get the treebook 2nd hand for x pence + couple of quid delivery on amazon, won't glow in the dark but sounds like a less convoluted solution.

thanks james, i'll try that.

much prefer reading on kindle to actual paper, to the extent that i probably wouldn't get round to it if i bought it. but even that needs importing from america, mustn't have ever been published over here

the reverse happens too, like Graham Greene e-books are available in the UK but not the US, due to some rights issue.

pretty often the only option is piracy, if the format works for your reader

last resort is to get someone in america to buy it for me and go through the impossible process of trying to crack the drm, anything to avoid the terrible burden of having to turn actual pages by hand

"the impossible process of trying to crack the drm"

It is a piece of piss with Calibre. I am thick as pigshit and managed to break drm whilst drunk on two bottles of wine one night.

"pretty often the only option is piracy"

That is about 95% of my library right now >:)

Amazon's web site does make it tedious as hell to get the ebook files once you purchase them. As xelab says, removing the DRM with Calibre is not difficult. Setting up the plugin to do so is a little convoluted, but you only have to do it once.

The only hard bit was finding where the azw3 file was dumped iirc.

that was my main problem when i tried a year or so ago, setting up the plugin. totally stumped me. probably a bad place to ask but could you point to an idiot's guide?

> Amazon's web site does make it tedious as hell to get the ebook files once you purchase them

i have a Kobo Mini but i also have Kindle for PC installed and downloading to that just puts the file in My Documents / My Kindle Content directory (Windows 7). sort by date and it's the top .azw (name is cryptic)

not everything is available for Kindle For PC though, i find. but it's mostly graphical things that aren't.

Exactly. I have to install the stupid Kindle app on my computer to download a file.

could be worse, you could be trying to do it on linux 8)

I think Linux users only read O'Reilly publications anyway? : )

And NI, this is the how-to I used:

https://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/calibre-plugins-the-simplest-option-for-removing-most-ebook-drm/

It worked as of two or three months ago, so it's probably still OK.

ah great, thanks. any americans on here want a book that's only on kindle in the uk and fancy an illicit trade?

i got the 'ad subsidized' paperwhite for now b/c poor even tho it is TACKY AS HELL to beam ads to my pocket, but so far they have been for like thrillers and romance novels, big sellers. i think somehow today because i was browsing for cheap/free kindle editions of public domain classics, i flipped a switch, because now all i'm getting ads for is jobseeker self-help.

That sounds shit, can't you just get ad respite by turning off the Wi-Fi?

xp
This is the idiot guide I used to break drm with calibre, honest it is not complex, just a plug-in and it is done.
http://www.howtogeek.com/162994/how-to-strip-the-drm-from-your-kindle-ebooks-for-cross-device-enjoyment-and-archiving/

i suppose i could, but i've taken it places without wi-fi, it seems it just loads the last one. or maybe loads a queue to make sure you never go without.

seems like half the point is to see if they can get you to accidentally bump the buy button when you're unlocking the screen

I am also poor at the moment j and buy what I can afford to buy and try to support good writers, but when they try and sell downloads at almost hardback prices the publishing companies can go fuck themselves & I will go to the torrent sites instead.

i think somehow today because i was browsing for cheap/free kindle editions of public domain classics, i flipped a switch, because now all i'm getting ads for is jobseeker self-help

Exactly the same thing happened to me a couple of days ago! Stuck a bunch of project gutenberg books on it and now getting ads about how to fill in my resume.

oh i been stealin books for a minute, i would only pay for a kindle version of a real book out of convenience/exigency. i bought it because i wanted to read florio's montaigne translation more properly and the OOP three volumes of it come pretty pricey, so i figured i'd economize and use the thing to read some of the stolen books i've been stockpiling in pdf form. but the existing e-texts of the florio suck pretty bad so i just said fuck it and went for the slightly tarted up kindle version (good size formatting and a table of contents, but LOTS of OCR errors).

the whole experience is, i dunno.

apparently the app switched from using a downloaded dictionary to looking definitions up on wikipedia? not into it, especially when i don't have service.

maybe it picks? my on-device dictionary uses the downloaded ones but when they fail it tries wikipedia

Yep

oh huh, apparently i've only been looking up the really esoteric ones then.